Wednesday, August 26, 2015

How Early Christians Changed the Sex-Abuse Culture

The sexual abuse of children has
now become a major and publicly recognized concern (and high time too!).
A recent study by John W. Martens shows that for early Christians, too, it was
a major concern, and that this is reflected in what appears to be a distinctive
early Christian vocabulary to refer to the practice: John W. Martens,
“‘Do Not Sexually Abuse Children’: The Language of Early Christian Sexual
Ethics,” in Children in Late Ancient Christianity, eds. Cornelia B.
Horn and Robert R. Phenix (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 227-54.

As Martens notes, there was a whole
Greek vocabulary for the practice of having sex with children: “pederastia”
(“child-love”), “pederastes” (“child-lover”), etc. Indeed,
Roman-era poets and others celebrate the practice, and it seems to have been
tolerated widely. It was particularly slave-children who likely suffered
the most. But (and this is
Martens’ contribution) in early Christian texts we see what appears to be a
rejection of these benign and condoning terms in favour of terms to express
forthrightly that the practice is evil and destructive [emphasis added].

In Christian texts from the second
century onward, the person who engages in sex with children is called a “paidophthoros”
(“child-corrupter/abuser”), and there is the prohibition, “do not corrupt/abuse
children” (“me paidophthoreseis”). Our earliest instances are in
Epistle of Barnabas (10:6; 19:4) and Didache (2:2). These terms seem to
have been coined by early Christians to re-label and condemn the practice and
those who engage in it: Not “child-love,” but “child-corruption.”

Another important observation by
Martens is that these texts show, not only that early Christians condemned the
practice, but also that they recognized the need to avoid it among
Christians. The exhortations in these passages are in texts written
primarily for Christians to read, and, along with the other exhortations, were
intended to shape Christian behaviour collectively.

It’s fascinating to see how beliefs
and stances on behaviour can generate terminology like this. And it’s one
indication of an early stage in the revolution in “sexual logic” generated by
early Christianity that is described by Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin:
The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity(Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).